Well, we’ve just started the new year off and amidst all the Top 10, Top 25, and Top 100 shows on VH1, E!, and MSNBC, we decided to make our own Top 10 list. So brace yourselves for “Bryan and Lianne’s Top 10 Most Memorable Events From 2004”. These are 10 things that happened to our little family that seem like a big deal to us. For more about the goings on Bryan and Lianne’s world, feel free to check out our weblog and photo gallery at http://bryanandlianne.name/
10) Monday Night Hoops – Ok, so I’m cheating on number 10. It’s not really a family event, but it’s a big deal to me and I’m writing the review so I take author’s license. At some point in 2004 Mark managed to get us an evening of basketball in a church gym every week. This has been awesome for me, especially during the winter. It’s another opportunity to hang out with a bunch of cool guys and play some competitive hoops. It’s also a way to bridge the incredible gap between the lives of my work friends and my church friends. I can’t begin to explain how much I enjoy it.
9) Season’s Passes – It’s become somewhat of a tradition now for us to get season’s passes to Busch Gardens and this year was no exception. We also got passes to OceanBreeze Water Park, and with my spiffy work schedule we got to go to both places quite a bit. 
It was definitely tough spending an entire day at an amusement park with all 3 kids, but Jaron is old enough now that he can ride some of the rides and he really enjoys it. He’s trying real hard to grow a few more inches so that next year he can ride Apollo’s Chariot. 🙂
\8) Busy Year for Davin – Davin had a pretty busy first year of life, and quite frankly it tuckered the poor fella out. Being 1 year old is a lot of work. You’re growing 
super fast, sprouting new teeth, learning to talk, crawl, and then walk. That’s tiring stuff. He’s really grown so much from the scalp down, but that hair is struggling. We’re still holding out for the curly red hair and if you look at some of the pictures you’ll get a glimpse of it. His personality is great and he interacts with the other kids really well. He was definitely a little tough to handle when he was younger, only because he had problems sleeping through the night. He’s worked all of that out though and he is a sweetie. He’s very tough and adventurous, climbing on everything and tasting everything. He’s exceptionally smart too and is already talking to everyone and everything around him. It will be exciting to see what this next year holds for him.
7) Ava the Princess – Somehow over the past year Ava went from a typical kid to a typical girl. She loves changing clothes and 
playing dress up. She carries around dolls, feeding them and putting them to bed. She loves anything “princess”, and wants to be one herself. All of our kids enjoy music, but Ava seems to be the most “in tune” to it. She’s adorable as she spins and dances to the songs, singing along incoherently. The transformation to femaledom is so complete that she’s even started whining over inconsequential things. She’s an incredible cutie, and has really started to develop her personality as well. She knows all of her letters and can recognize her numbers up to 10, so she’s definitely got brains. She talks a lot too, but she needs to take along a translator when she leaves the house. My family has no idea what happens during the 3rd year of a little girl’s life, so the next year should be fun.
6) Jaron the Big Kid – I don’t know if every kid learns everything that every kid should ever learn all at the age of 6, but Jaron sure
did. He played an organized sport for the first time, tee ball. He learned to ride his bicycle. He caught his first fish. He learned to swim. He hit his funny bone for the first time. He lost his first tooth, 5 total, in fact. He rode his first wooden coaster and went down his first water slide. Quite a full year for the big guy. I do mean big guy. He’s tall and lanky. He’s in 1st grade now and is already reading 4th/5th grade level books. He can do advanced addition and subtraction, and he’s memorizing his multiplication tables. We spent all evening, during and after dinner one day, thinking up homophones. I’m not sure how many kids would get a kick out of that, but he sure did. I’m positive that there are many more new things for Jaron to experience, like shooting a gun for example, but I just don’t know when they’ll all happen. UPDATE: Just this afternoon when I picked Jaron up from school, he started asking me about infinity. I tried to explain the mathematical concept to him and he asks me, “What if our house was infinity miles away?” I told him if that was the case, we’d never get there. So then he asks, “What if we were going infinity speed?” … I’m stumped.
5) Summer Trips – We took two major trips last summer, one to New Hampshire, and one to Atlanta. We went to New Hampshire in late June to attend the Free State Project Porcupine Festival. You can check out the pics here. To summarize, we had a great time. It’s beautiful up there, and hanging out with 300 fellow libertarians was a treat for me. We’re definitely planning to go back in 2005. We also took a trip down to Atlanta to see family. Most of my mom’s side of the family is in Atlanta now and we had a ton of fun hanging out with them. Somehow the kids (Jaron, Ava, Katelyn, Kara, and Danielle) managed to spend 45 minutes playing hide and go seek in our tiny hotel room. We, of course, ate at Sonny’s BBQ and also hit the ESPN Zone, and Ted’s for some bison burgers. Both trips were a blast, but all those 10 hour plus trips was pretty tiring. This year Lianne and I are planning to fly down to Miami for a few days, we’ll probably go to New Hampshire again, and we’ve got a big family vacation planned down in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
4) More College for Lianne? – Lianne has a B.S. in Speech Pathology, but she’s always wanted to work with sign language. She’s been taking ASL (American Sign Language) classes at the local community college for the past 4 years, between pregnancies, but hasn’t been convinced about how she wanted to use her schooling. This past summer she took a class called “Working With Deaf and Hard of Hearing”. She was exposed to a lot of career opportunities that she hadn’t thought of before. One that really stuck out was
teaching ASL at the high school or college level. Many states now recognize ASL as a 2nd language for high school credits. Virginia is one of those states and some of the local schools here in Tidewater are starting to hire ASL teachers. With our family set at its maximum size for the foreseeable future we see an opportunity over the next few years for Lianne to go back to school and get a Masters in Deaf Studies with a Sign Language Teaching Concentration. We both see teaching as an excellent job opportunity for a mom with school aged kids, and we’re excited about the possibilities. Unfortunately, the closest university that offers this program is Gallaudet in Washington DC. We took a trip up to DC in the Fall to attend an FSP (Free State Project) luncheon, and to scope out the University. That only enhanced Lianne’s excitement and we are considering making a move up there within the next couple of years.
3) The Lovesac – During that first trip up to DC we stopped at Potomac Mills Mall and happened upon a store that had just opened that day. They were selling these gigantic bean bags that were the most comfortable things we had ever sat in. We were in love with the Lovesac. You’ve got to see it to believe it.
2) Christmas Holiday – I had two and a half weeks off for Christmas and it flew by. Clay and Angie were in town from Miami, and the entire family took a trip up to the mountains to do some snow tubing, which was a blast. We’ve got some pics of the trip that do a pretty good job showing the fun we had. Other than that it was a time for family and a time for giving, a time for loving and a time for living. Haha, just call me Mr. Hallmark. We did spend lots of time with both of our families though, and we played a lot of board/party games … and poker. The only downer was that our kids were a 
little under the weather much of the time, so that definitely sapped some of our energy. Everyone perked up in time for Christmas though, and wherever we went chaos, noise, and laughter followed.
1) Life is Good – I needed something profound to wrap up our top 10 list. The title that came to me was simply, “Life is Good”. We are indeed blessed. I saw some tsunami survivors on the news with smiles on their faces carrying on an animated discussion despite the disaster that surrounded them. I hope that I would have the same positive outlook on life no matter what my circumstances, but thankfully I don’t have to try to be happy. God has blessed us with every good thing, and we are thankful. We are convinced that 2005 has even more good things in store, and we can’t wait to experience them.